


Quiet Time

by coldmilkchoices



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Gen, ManDadlorian, Napping, Not a modern AU, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Parenthood, baby yoda is too cute to resist, is this a plot to get din to sleep more? perhaps, kids love to get up in the middle of the night, the classic game of DONT WAKE THE BABY
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:55:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22645228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldmilkchoices/pseuds/coldmilkchoices
Summary: Putting children to bed- and keeping them there- is a science and an art form parents (and some older siblings) have perfected over millenia. Some parents have devoted years to this craft and achieved mastery, fearing the whims of no child at bedtime.Unfortunately, Din Djarin is not a master, and must stumble through the process as all new parents do.
Relationships: Baby Yoda & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 226





	1. Chapter 1

Din is balancing out his expenses and putting together a to-do list when he hears a soft thump from the next room.

The ship is silent except for the quiet humming of the hyperdrive and the slight rattle of one of the fans in the ventilation system starting to come loose. The only lights in the hold are the single light Din had turned on above his nook in the corner of the hold, the indicators on the ramp controls, and a little blinking light coming from Din’s kitchenette.

When the child peeks through the half-open door of his room, Din pretends not to notice for a moment, finishing off one of the notes in his to-do list He sees the child’s big eyes glittering in the light in his peripheral vision. Din half-hopes that if he doesn’t acknowledge the child he’ll turn around and get back in bed, but he knows he isn’t that lucky. Finally, he turns his head towards the child. 

“Are you gonna come over here or what?” he asks. The child giggles and toddles into the pool of light around Din. When he reaches Din’s leg, he looks up and lifts his arms to reach for Din.

“You want up?” The child gurgles happily, and Din reaches down to scoop him onto the bench next to him. 

“You can stay up for a minute, and then back to bed, you little womp rat.” The child gives Din a toothy smile and sleepily rups an eye. Din chuckles and turns back to his datapad. He needs to stop by Horldoeff station because they have cheaper food prices and he’s buyting for two now, but he’s not sure if they have the kind of bone broth the kid seems to like. The sublight engines need a tune-up and the nav systems need an upgrade, which he likes to get from -

Din pauses.

The child has scooted closer to him, and is now trying to squeeze beneath his arm. Din lifts it, bemused, and the child burrows in against him, leaning his little head up against Din’s side just above his hip, about where his belt would be if he was still wearing it. One of the child’s little clawed hands comes to clutch at Din’s leg at the top of his cuisse, and then he lets out a little contented sigh.

Din remains absolutely still for several long moments, staring down at the child, arm still floating in mid-air. The child yawns and burrows deeper into Din’s side, oblivious to the complete cession of Din’s thought processes when confronted with the cutest thing he’s ever witnessed. Slowly and carefully, Din tucks his arm around the child and waits to see what the response will be.

The child coos softly, hand clenching and unclenching in the fabric of Din’s pants. Din balances his datapad in one hand and then goes back to working. Din needs to check how much ammunition he still has for his various guns, and while he’s at it, it’s probably about time for him to be checking over the condition of all his weaponry as well. He adds it to the list.

“It’s a lot of work to keep everything going, huh _ad’ika_?” The child’s ears prick up when he’s addressed and he babbles sleepily. Din hums in acknowledgement. 

As he continues working, he’s careful to move as little as possible. Din keeps stealing peeks down at the child, watching his eyelids dip lower and lower. After about ten minutes, the child is once again fast asleep. Din pauses to look down at him again, watching a long ear flick in his sleep. There’s a warm feeling in his chest he hasn’t felt in a long time, and a feeling of contentment washes over him. 

Din knows down to his bones that he will protect this child to his dying breath.

He blinks suddenly heavy eyes and then turns back to his datapad. They still have about four standard hours before they leave hyperspace. _One more note_ , Din thinks, _and then off to bed._

  
  


Din wakes to a soft beeping from his comm unit. He reaches over to paw the alarm off, and then freezes when there’s a small shift and a sigh from his side. 

He slowly looks down to find the child still asleep on his side. Din stares at the child for a long moment, but luckily he doesn’t wake. 

Din pauses a moment to take stock of the situation. He’s fallen asleep in the little seating nook with the child on top of him, his datapad is flirting with the artificial gravity by poking halfway off the bench, and Din has a horrible crick in his neck. Din breathes in, rescues his datapad from its impending doom, and checks the time.

He has about ten minutes before they reach their destination, but he realizes he has a problem - namely the child asleep on top of him. Din considers the child very carefully, planning out his next steps. With all the care he can muster, Din slowly slides his arm beneath the child, scooping him up towards his chest. The child shifts but doesn’t wake.

Din then stands up as smoothly as he can, never taking his eyes off the child and freezing once more after he’s fully upright. Reassured that the child is still asleep, Din focuses on taking even steps towards his cot, the only place on his ship fit for sleeping, attempting to move the child as little as possible. Din palms the door control for his little closet of a sleeping area, and the door slides open mercifully quietly.

Din steps into the miniscule space between the door and his cot, and carefully deposits the child into his bed, sliding his arm out from underneath the child like he’s handling live explosives. The child turns over and Din goes absolutely still, but all he does is snuggle into the blankets.

Din quietly backs out of the space and slides the door mostly shut, only then allowing himself to breathe a sigh of relief and heads up towards the cockpit. He settles heavily into his seat sliding his helmet off to scrub a hand across his face and attempt to roll out the crick in his neck.

The dashboard beeps a warning and Din begins to prep for the drop back into realspace. The _Razor Crest_ rattles a bit as the sublight engines rumble to life, and the streaks outside the viewscreen resolve into separate star-points. After considering a map of the system, Din finds a spot to set the ship down on a nearby moon, shuts down the engines, and locks everything down before returning the hold and his tiny room, shutting off the light in the hold as he goes.

He sheds his armor and his stiffer outer layers, then gets into bed, careful not to jolt the child. Din lets himself just breathe for several long moments, trying to let go of the tensions of the day. There’s a rustling noise and then a little body curls up against his chest.

Din smiles without opening his eyes, and curls an arm around the child. Din is warm, and so is the child, and there’s a sense of contentment that Din distantly remembers from his childhood.

“ _Jate ca, ad’ika_ ,” he whispers, dropping a kiss to the crown of the child’s head, and then lets himself fall asleep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The child refuses to go to sleep, and Din is at his wit's end.

The child.  _ Will not go to sleep _ .

Din has tried everything. He fed the child. He turned a fan on. He turned the fan off. He sat in the room with him for fifteen minutes hoping that would allow the child to fall asleep, but the child absolutely refused to lay down for longer than a few minutes at a time no matter what Din did.

Din is on the verge of… of something he’s too stressed out to put a name to. He just needs to be left alone for forty-five minutes without worrying the child is getting into something he shouldn’t. That’s all he needs, and then he can put the child to bed early during the ship’s night cycle. Din has things to do. He needs to clean some of the weapons he’s too afraid to pull out around the child for fear he’ll get hurt, he needs to contact people without being interrupted, and most importantly, he needs some silence or he’s going to go out of his mind. The child isn’t usually very loud, but he’s been talkative today and when the child is awake, silence has the opposite effect Din needs because it means the child is getting into something he shouldn’t and Din needs to go on full alert.

Din is watching the child, praying to all his ancestors that this time he finally goes down. The child’s eyes droop as Din takes another lap around the hold, rocking him gently but with decreasing patience. The child takes a very long blink, and Din puts every ounce of willpower he has left into keeping his body relaxed. Three increasingly long blinks later, the child’s eyes do not open again.

Din draws in a careful breath and takes another five slow laps just to be safe.

Finally, he turns towards his cot. The door is already open, and he steps through and deposits the child on the bed in a single fluid movement. He then gently drapes a blanket over the child and then steps with all the stealth and purpose he’d use on a job to get out of the room and then slides the door shut as quietly as he can. In the moment before the door closes, Din sees an ear flip and light glinting off two liquid-black eyes.

The door shuts and Din resists the urge to slam his head into it as hard as he can.

_ Maybe, _ he thinks a little hysterically,  _ Maybe he’ll fall back asleep this time. _

There is an awful anticipation in the air, the dread of a man waiting for the guards to come around the corner and escort him to his execution. There is silence from the room beyond. Din allows himself to hope.

The door slides open to reveal the child, who happily babbles up at Din as if everything is absolutely fine. Din wishes someone would shoot at him right now so he could tear them to pieces. Instead he bends down to pick the child up.

“Why won’t you sleep,” Din asks the child. The child yawns and rubs an eye. “You are clearly tired,  _ why won’t you go to sleep _ ,” The child smiles up at Din with the light of a thousand stars and babbles something unintelligible.

Din turns to his datapad and consults the ‘net on what to do once again. The ‘net suggests singing a lullaby. Din frowns down at the datapad and tries to remember a lullaby from his youth. More recently the songs he’s heard are varyingly filthy drinking songs sung by correspondingly inebriated beings when he visits taverns and snatches of high energy dance music he’s heard while in more heavily-populated regions in pursuit of a target, and neither are good fits for a child he’s trying to send to sleep.

“Okay,  _ ad’ika _ , let’s try something new. Want to hear a song?” The child babbles something up at him and then opens his mouth wide around an immense yawn, exposing a maw that should, by all rights, be too big for the little being in Din’s arms. “C’mon then,” says Din, and he heads back into his room.

The child’s ears turn down and he begins to fuss near immediately as Din situates them on the bed, but Din shushes him. Din pauses a moment to think. He hasn’t sung anything in a long while. Finally, he settles on a fairly popular nursery rhyme.

“Ma’ra had a little nerf, little nerf, little nerf, Ma’ra had a little nerf that stunk like- who’s milk was sweet as honey” Din sings quietly, stumbling a little as he almost sings the version some of his age-mates had sung to make fun of the song once they had gotten older. The child perks up at the sound of his voice, and finally stops trying to escape his grasp to go out into the hold again. Din cycles through “Ma’ra Had a Little Nerf” a few times before switching to a rhyme about hyperspace. The child stills and plasters an ear across the top of Din’s chest, listening to the rumble of his voice. 

After a while, Din remembers a song his parents used to sing him when he was a child. Before the war came, and Din became a foundling, back when Din’s whole world was the town he grew up in. Din realizes he’s slipped from singing into humming, and tries to hum the beginning of the song in the hopes that it will come back to him. He looks down at the child, who is sliding into that heavy, safe kind of sleep that children fall into when they are totally content. Din starts a little hesitantly, trying to remember the words and the melody.

“Now it’s time to say goodnight,

Goodnight,

Sleep tight.

Now the sun turns out his light,

Goodnight,

Sleep tight,

Dreams sweet dreams for me,

Dreams sweet dreams for you”

Din can’t quite remember the rest of the song, so he settles for repeating that for a while. The child falls completely asleep, and Din is a little afraid to get up in case he wakes up again, but he also doesn’t want to leave this perfect slow moment.

When Din catches himself blinking a little too long, and that the pauses between his humming phrases keep getting longer, he knows it’s time to get up even though he would love nothing more than to drop off into sleep himself. He carefully slides the child off of his chest and into the cot, and drapes a blanket overtop him. At the door, he peeks back to check on his charge, and finds to his utter relief that the child is deeply asleep, not even shifting position.

Once the door is securely closed, Din stands in the middle of the hold and basks in the feeling of peace suffusing the ship, giving himself one last moment before he gets to his tasks.

The moment of peace is shattered when his comm begins to blare like the siren for a weapon of mass destruction. Din nearly gains the ability to fly without a jetpack in his shock before he slams his hand down on his wrist. In his haste to stop the noise as soon as possible he accidentally answers the call and the person on the other end answers as loudly as is physically possible for him to be.

“ _ Din! Me’v-” _

“Paz if you don’t shut up  _ right now  _ I’ll turn you in for the highest bounty Fett has out on him gift-wrapped in your own guts.” Din hisses with as much venom as he can muster, which is  _ a lot _ right now. Paz falls silent and Din freezes completely, listening intently to the ship. Miracle of all miracles, there is no sound, meaning the child is still asleep. Din nearly puddles to the floor in relief, but instead he lowers the volume on his comm unit and heads up towards the cockpit.

“ _...Din? _ ” Paz asks much more quietly this time after another minute or so.

“Sorry,” says Din. “It took me ages to get the kid to sleep and my comm was at full volume.”

“ _Oh. Sorry_.” There is a long, awkward pause.

“ _A Fett bounty? Really?_ ” Paz says finally. “ _You really hate me that much?”_

“Well if you’re gonna wake up my kid I might as well make a good profit off my revenge,” Din says, and the tension is broken. Din relaxes into the conversation and thinks over what he needs to do while the child is sleeping.

He also makes a mental note to look up more music he can play for the kid, since he seemed to like it so much. 

And if he’s being honest, Din liked it too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song- Good Night by The Beatles
> 
> About halfway through this chapter I realized part of the inspiration for it was this video:  
> https://youtu.be/NGOeBEtfYrM
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed it! :)

**Author's Note:**

> Ad'ika - little one; affectionate form of son/daughter  
> Jate ca - Good night
> 
> I was consumed by the need for BY falling asleep on top of Din and this happened.
> 
> If it's getting late for you, I advise you follow the example of these two and find yourself some warm blankets. Sweet dreams!
> 
> Next chapter: Din got off... a little too easy this time, didn't he?


End file.
